


of mundane things

by vaudelin



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Season/Series 14, Canon Compliant, Dean in Castiel's Dream, Getting Together, M/M, Tree of Life, dream walking, gap fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-01
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:14:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21634243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaudelin/pseuds/vaudelin
Summary: “You never told us,” Dean hisses, during a muted conversation carried in the protective depths of the kitchen. “You got hitched to adjinn? Since when?”“I did tell you,” Cas growls back. He slams on the faucet, filling the glass with vigor. “It’s not my fault you weren’t listening.”
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 19
Kudos: 235





	of mundane things

The bunker sirens blare out some time after midnight, slicing through Dean’s dreams and dunking him straight into darkness.

He throws himself out of bed on instinct, his consciousness playing catch-up to his hands and feet, which have already grabbed him a knife and carried him out his bedroom door.

Sam runs into him in the hall, brandishing a machete and massive bedhead. Without fully waking, Dean first greets him like an enemy, then course-corrects his blade’s lethal arc by a quarter inch and throws himself back against the door. Deafened by the alarms, Sam gives him a bewildered look instead of shout, to which Dean replies with an equally baffled expression. No better off from it, they rush together toward the main hall.

Plastering themselves to either side of the entryway, they spot the shadows moving across the red-streaked war room. Dean exchanges a tactical look with Sam, and on the same count they throw themselves out with weapons raised. 

How the djinn got past the bunker’s security is a mystery. Why so many djinn are working in tandem is another. 

The fight comes to them quickly, half a dozen djinn fanning out like phalanxes around a central figure. A handful more approach Sam and Dean with elaborate scimitars outstretched. Dean tightens his fist around his knife, counts himself lucky for grabbing a bronze blade; if only it were a little longer, and already dipped in lamb’s blood.

He dodges the first two scimitars slicing at him, pushes in while Sam gets tossed into the stairs by a couplet of aggressive djinn. 

The phalanx is ready for Dean, the djinn holding their silver bucklers upraised, curiously on the defensive.

Dean and Sam might be outnumbered, but they have the home team advantage. Quickly calculating their odds, Dean figures the best shot they have is to take out the presumed leader, the central djinn, and hope the remainder flee when she’s dead. 

Dean grabs a chair from around the table, lunges forward while throwing it at them. A djinn takes the direct hit, stumbles back in surprise. Dean uses the momentum to close ranks, grabbing someone’s scimitar arm and twisting, getting in close enough to gut his knife up between the djinn’s heaving ribs. 

The djinn collapses, bloody hands grasping at the wound. 

Good. Things always get easier once the monsters start to bleed.

Dean grabs its sword. He turns towards the central djinn, muscle memory closing the gap between them in a fraction of a second.

The central djinn locks eyes with Dean. She does not flinch back, not even as his hand closes around her neck.

Sam’s got his back shortly after, holding the remaining djinn in a standoff by the time Dean has their presumed leader pinned to the war room table, a scimitar blade pressed to her throat. Presumed, not only because of the intricate black markings tattooing her skin, but also for the regal manner in which she stares up at him.

Still not begging, or fearful. Instead, her eyes bore into Dean like she knows she will not die.

Dean draws back the scimitar, the terrible siren red glinting along its length. Tightening his fist, he readies to swing the blade.

“Dean, stop!”

Dean glances up at the entryway, spotting where Cas has come bursting through the bunker’s main door, rumpled and breathless. Dean holds still, ears straining for further answer. The tension between Sam and the remaining djinn pauses, as if waiting to know what will happen next.

Sighing, Cas drops to a saunter by time he reaches the bottom of the stairs. His gaze disdainfully flits around the frozen chaos of the room. “Don’t kill her,” Cas shouts to Dean. “She’s my wife.”

Dean can’t help it. The scimitar clatters free from his fingertips.

“The Tree of Life is dead,” the queen of the djinn tells them, once the bunker alarms have been silenced and she’s been seated comfortably at a table in the library. They had to drag some ornate arm chair out of storage to make her say that much, and had to wait until a second chair — for her _husband_ — had likewise been located and cleaned before she even fully acknowledged Dean or Sam.

She eyes a shallow cut on her palm, made some time during the scuffle. Her nose wrinkles as she pokes a nail along its raw edge.

Dean waits for her pronouncement to carry some kind of emotional follow-through, a weight that signals just how terrible this event should be considered, in the grand scheme of things. Instead, the queen lifts the glass of water Cas has brought her, and takes from it a tepid sip.

Sam locks eyes with Dean, exchanging another shorthand, bewildered look. The whole night has been a waking nightmare, and nothing continues to make sense. “And that’s … bad, right?”

The queen sweeps her black eyes over Sam, as interested in him as she was in the cut on her hand. “Terribly.”

Dean thumps a fist against his own table and swings his legs down, returns to standing. The remainder of the queen’s entourage titters as he moves closer, their bodies tensing for the scimitars currently housed in their scabbards. Dean leaves them hanging, briefly, before bumping his hip against the table where the queen sits. “So you came all the way here from Syria to tell us… why?”

The djinn looks up at Dean, then looks to where Cas sits across from her. Dean can’t see the look Cas gives her, though he can guess what kind of eyeroll is currently happening behind his back. But then a measured conversation passes between Cas and the queen, one that uses looks and stares Dean would’ve thought only come with years of history propped up behind them. It startles him, to think that Cas has already built some brand of silent speech between him and his _wife_.

( _“You never told us,” Dean hisses, during a muted conversation carried in the protective depths of the kitchen. “You got hitched to a_ djinn _? Since when?”_

 _“I did tell you,” Cas growls back. He slams on the faucet, filling the glass with vigor. “It’s not my fault you weren’t listening.”_ )

The queen runs a finger along the rim of her glass. “My cousin, Dijwar, has long disagreed with the legitimacy of my reign. Something about his mother being overlooked for mine.” 

Beneath her finger rings a solemn tune, a single note held in warbling wait. 

“He brought traitors into our kingdom, sought to seize the Tree for himself.” Her smile sharpens, her dark eyes rising to meet Sam and Dean in challenge as she takes another drink. “I burned it down instead.”

For all the chill it sends down Dean’s spine, the news seems meaningless to the queen and her minions. 

Sam straightens, likewise affected as Dean. His hands look empty, clutching for some known book on some known shelf. “The lore says that without the Tree, all life on earth with eventually die.”

“Yes,” the djinn agrees. She passes her empty glass to her nearest companion, who takes off, head bowed, to refill it from the kitchen. She follows her minion’s path with her eyes, her attention elegantly drawing back to Cas. “Which is why I need my husband to replant it.”

Dean cranes his neck, looking around to where Cas seems equally perplexed. 

“That better not be a euphemism,” Dean mutters to him. 

Sam strikes out his foot, kicking Dean in the shin.

“Unfortunately, our spell didn’t leave any fruit left over,” Cas tells the queen, nodding his head once Dean nods in agreement.

The djinn gives a tinkling laugh, light as the note from her glass. “Oh, Castiel. The Tree is not something that grows from a seed.” She leans across the table, her smile sharpening. Her blue palm comes to rest atop Cas’ hand. “It can only be replanted from dreams.”

“I don’t like it,” Dean repeats, even though nobody was listening the first time, and nobody is listening still. 

The entourage of djinn flutters around the archive room chosen for the ritual, painting symbols in ink and gold across the walls and floor. Sam brings in ingredients as they request them. He spares Dean a mournful look as their paths cross ways at the door.

“She just needs to be in his head for a couple minutes,” Sam says again, as if Dean hasn’t already heard it repeated enough times. 

“Long enough to announce her position to the world,” Dean replies. He heard that part of the plan enough times, too. 

None of it brings him comfort; in fact, it brings the opposite. He doesn’t need to hear any of them talk ever again.

“You think Cas is in danger here?” asks Sam. “That she’s gonna do something to him while she’s in there?”

Dean chews his lip, waiting until his nerves have been tightly roped into a bundle, and he’s banked the worst of his fears at bay. “He’s bait, Sammy. Out here, the queen’s drawing out her evil cousin just as much as she’s grabbing the Tree in there.”

Sam nods, keeping silent. They both know there’s nothing really that can be said to calm him.

From where she and Cas sit in matching arm chairs, the djinn queen cranes her neck back until she has Dean’s attention snared. “You are welcome to join us, if it would soothe your sorrows,” she calls to him. One hand unfurls from her lap, her intricate tattoos eclipsed by the palm she flips upright.

Sam exchanges a look with Dean, one that Dean breaks by stepping forward. “You’re taking hitchhikers on this trip?”

“If it pleases you, knowing you are there,” the djinn replies, saccharine-sweet. “Dijwar is more likely to attack in the dream, anyway. You could be useful, as a shield.”

Dean shoots Sam a look that says, _So there_ , to which Sam shoots back, _Are you seriously doing this_?

And yeah. Yeah, he is.

Dean kneels before the queen, finding a comfortable enough position before accepting her hand. “Alright. Beam me up, Scotty.”

A playful smirk crosses the queen’s lips. She pulls his hand up to rest on Cas’ knee, her grip tightening in what Dean figures is an approving way.

Dean blinks, and suddenly the archive room is gone. 

The cold concrete beneath his knees has disappeared. He’s enveloped in a room so dark he cannot see. Standing upright, hands at his side. Mind suspiciously devoid of the worries he _knows_ had been gnawing at him only moments before.

“Where are we?” Dean asks the empty room.

Except it isn’t empty, not any more.

Where he’s at now, Dean would’ve thought it was the war room, except it’s…

Bright. Too bright. 

Too much light seeps in through windows that aren’t there, back in reality. The stairs to the main entrance glitter in bronze and gold, not wrought-iron black. The floor is a creamy white, so crisp and clean it nearly hurts Dean’s eyes. Even the green tiles coloring the walls seem verdant and rich, the grout between them all but sparkling.

“It is his dream,” the djinn replies, cryptic, appearing between one breath and the next beside him. 

Behind them, down halls and in the library, the bunker echoes with conversation and movement, laughter and life filling the world at the corner of Dean’s eyes. Voices he might’ve heard once, before blood had been shed by an archangel’s hand. Curtains are closed against all of them, leaving them a warm but bitter memory.

They cross to the base of the main stairs, the light beating like a pulse as they move. The queen grasps her skirts, lifting the hem enough for a bare foot to peek out and touch the first step. 

Her free hand extends toward Dean. He gives her his arm, falling into place beside her. 

Together, they climb the stairs.

Outside, the world is a summer field bathed in a limitless blue sky. The bunker door is gone, replaced by a horizon that extends in green every which way he looks. Plants grow in neat rows around them, vegetables and fruits alike, all tended to by an attentive hand. 

Dean balks at the vision, though he doesn’t know why. It’s beautiful, and he knows it, even as he says, “It’s not like this. In the real world.”

The djinn winds her arm through Dean’s, pulling him closer.

“The Tree of Life cannot grow within a mortal’s mind,” the djinn tells him softly, as they walk. “It takes too long, and mortals are too fragile. They dream too often of things that destroy.” She runs her free hand up the stems of passing tomato plants. Down the bowed branches of apple trees. “But so often, immortals do not dream either, and those who do cannot be trusted with something so rare as Life itself.”

Beyond their row, Dean’s ears prick on the sound of laughter. 

“How curious a thing,” the djinn says, “your Castiel is.”

Ahead, Dean spies a tan trench coat, sprawled forgotten among the cool roots of the trees. Shapes move beyond the treeline, colors flickering across his vision. 

Dean glimpses the back of his own head, his hair ruffled by the hands trailing down his neck, wrapping around his shoulders.

“How rare a thing, too,” the djinn continues. “A celestial who dreams of mundane things.”

The dream version of Dean makes a fuss out of being wrapped up in Cas, whose dirt-slicked fingers leave soiled imprints on Dean’s shirt and hair. Dean wraps his own arms around Cas and hefts him, spinning him in place. Cas laughs as he leans into it, his joy tucked tight against Dean’s neck, his crow’s feet crinkling against the tender skin found beneath Dean’s ear.

Beside him, the djinn pulls her arm free from Dean’s elbow, and Dean finds himself at a sudden loss, cold and alone in the shadows of the apple trees. 

His dream self brushes a smudge of dirt free from Cas’ cheek, in the sun up ahead.

His real self longs to touch Cas in the same way.

“Here,” the djinn says. 

With difficulty, Dean drags his attention away. Cupped within the queen’s palms is a spindly brown sapling, a supple stick topped by no more than half a dozen pale green leaves. The entirety of the Tree is grounded by a ball of damp black earth, bundled richly in her grip. 

“Watch for Dijwar while we leave,” she instructs Dean, motioning her chin toward the dark clouds rolling in on the endless horizon. “It will take some effort for us to wake with this.”

Dean nods numbly, his eyes still on himself and Cas. He only follows once it becomes clear the queen would leave without him, if it means her returning safely with the Tree.

Knowing that it isn’t real means nothing to Dean. It still feels like fish hooks pulling loose from his skin, the effort of leaving Cas and his dream self behind.

“Where’s Cas?” Dean asks suddenly, his eyes stinging. “The real one.” His gaze sweeps through their surroundings, vision blurry, but looking for any motion out of place.

The queen shrugs. “He is the earth on which we walk, for now. After all, a dream needs fertile soil to build upon.”

“Will he…” Dean stops. Swallows. He’s back in the orchard, cupping Cas’ dirty cheek in his hands. “Will he know which dream we’re in?”

The djinn closes her eyes, briefly elated, as she smiles. “What a fine talent you have for evading reality.” Opening, her knowing gaze snags sharply on Dean. “Why not ask the dreamer himself, oh lover boy?”

Dean’s cheeks feel warm, even within the building shiver of the dream.

When Dean awakens, his wakefulness returns in staggered increments. His limbs are heavy; his eyesight won’t sit right. He burbles nonsense as he struggles up, then collapses, back onto his knees.

By time Dean fully comes to, it’s to the sounds of a fight erupting.

“It’s Dijwar’s men,” the queen shouts at him, catching Dean up despite how his mind rebels against it. A companion drops back to arm her, passing the queen a scabbard adorned in rubies that glitter blood-red.

From where he’s crouched between the chairs, Dean looks around, panicked until he catches sight of Sam up ahead, back-to-back with an allied djinn behind him. The both of them have their blades upraised, slashing at enemy djinn as they come.

“Cas?” Dean calls, his attention circling back to the armchairs. The queen’s chair has been vacated, empty save for a twig and a lump of dirt, but Cas still lies sleeping in his. 

Dean touches at Cas’ face, his slack expression snuffling. His gaze drifts beneath closed eyelids.

_How curious a thing, your Castiel is. A celestial who dreams of mundane things._

“C’mon, Cas,” Dean mutters. His gentle taps against Cas’ cheek work up into a fever pace, his fingers bringing a flush to Cas’ skin. “Wake up, wake up.”

It frightens him, to think that Cas is locked somewhere inside himself, somewhere where clouds are rolling in and Dean won’t be there to brush the dirt from his face.

In a sudden rush, Dean knows what to do. 

It feels stupid, following dream logic in the real world, out where a very real battle is breaking around them. But still Dean brushes a palm against Cas’ cheek. Tucks his fingertips into the curls of Cas’ hair. Cups Cas’ chin and lilts up his mouth, all the better for Dean to press their lips together in a delicate kiss.

Cas is sun-warmed where they touch. His mouth is pliant, opening on the softest sigh. Dean sweeps his thumb across Cas’ cheek, and feels it come away with a scrape of damp earth. 

Cas opens his blue eyes, and abruptly Dean’s back outside that summer-drenched bunker, between the apple trees that grow around their lives.

“I’ve got him,” Cas breathes, a hand coming up to cup the back of Dean’s head. Their foreheads knock together, then come to rest, touching. “I’ve got Dijwar trapped in my dreams.”

“So it’s alright,” Sam asks, “to just leave him there? He’s not gonna just pop out the next time Cas has a dream?”

“Dijwar’s dead,” the queen answers simply, her attention wandering with the companions swarming around her, preparing their leave. “As djinn, we make dreams. We do not enter them. If the dreamer wakes while we’re inside of one, we are unmade.”

Dean stiffens, realization striking at the same time Cas archly says, “So I could have killed you and Dean, if I’d woken up earlier?”

The djinn queen smirks, her dark eyes bouncing playfully between them. “I gave you a fail safe manner of waking, if I correctly recall.”

Cas leans back, suddenly subdued. A blush works its way up Dean’s neck without his volition. Sam gives them both a curious look, to which Dean replies with a _Not now_ shake of his head. 

Dean coughs and inches back, making space between him and Cas. “So we’re good? The Tree is safe?”

“We’re good,” the queen agrees. To Cas, she says, “I will see you again should we need another sapling.” With a coquettish look to Dean, she adds, “Have fun with my husband, oh lover boy.”

“That’s not—” Dean cuts himself off, shaking his head. “Nevermind. Have a fun flight back to Syria.”

The djinn queen, with the young Tree of Life bundled safely in her arms, gives a demure flick of her wrist in reply.

**Author's Note:**

> rebloggable on [tumblr](https://vaudelin.tumblr.com/post/189414714913/of-mundane-things).


End file.
